Saturday, July 31, 2010

This is my attempt at putting all the hPVI information into an easy to understand graphical format, preferably one with pretty colors.

First I'll take you through the individual elements of the chart; the legislative seat chart, the hPVI chart and the house district spread chart, then combine those into one easy to understand Minnesota Legislative hPVI Chart With Pretty Colors.

What initially got the ball rolling in this direction was Joe's request for some sort of graphical chart of legislative seats.

…I wonder if there's a graphical way to show who controls the house seats in each of those districts.

This was the result of that:

Each cell represents a legislative seat, the numbers are Senate seats, and the corresponding letters are House seats. Blue means that seat is held by a DFLer, and red means it's held by a GOPer. The headings at the top are shaded blue because both chambers are controlled by the DFL; if one were controlled by the GOP the cell would be red.

Joe liked that chart but I wasn't quite satisfied, I wanted a way to integrate that chart with hPVI, which lead to the next chart, a way of formatting the hPVI information in a graphical way:

In this chart the headings at the top refer to the seat type, SD for senate district, A and B for that house district with the numbers along the side referring to the district number. The numbers in the cells are the hPVI numbers and the cells are color coded so that neutral districts are white, and the more Republican a district is the deeper shade of red it is, the more Democratic the more blue.

To that we can add a column for the district spread, the difference between the hPVI's of the two house districts, color coded from white to green.

Now we have two sort of similar looking charts that can be combined into one:

In one graphic we can see what party currently holds the district, what its partisan tilt is and how big of a difference in hPVI there is between the two house districts.